Notting Hill

Dinosara shared this one with me, and it’s a blind steeping in the sense that I made it first and looked it up to see what was in it after. I’m living dangerously, me! Turns out it was a vanilla flavoured black. You know, I have a suspicion that the lovely Dinosara has been paying attention to my quest for the perfect vanilla black… I must say I whole heartedly approve of this. (It’s such a nommy quest too, because all the ones I’ve been trying have been really good, but just not quite there yet.)

It smells very sweet and vanilla-y. Almost ever so slightly too sweet, but not quite into cloying territory yet. It’s just right on the border of being a bit much. Additionally there is a note of something kind of honey-y and nutty or perhaps more sort of fudge-y or caramel-y. That all sounds very awesome, but somehow it’s just not quite my perfect vanilla black perfect aroma. It lacks a bit of roughness. A bit of that leather-y pod-feeling to it. This all smells too sweet and adorable, and I want my vanilla black to be a bit more of a villain, really.

The flavour is strongly vanilla, but not the honey-y sweet fudge-y flavour from the aroma. This is more in the way of the perfect vanilla black, although still not quite there yet. It has that bit of roughness to it, and it is one of those that taste like tea primarily and the flavouring secondarily and not the other way around. It just doesn’t have that pseudo-coconut-y not that I like in a vanilla black. If it had that, we would be well on our way towards perfection, but I have come to realise that this note is bloody hard to find.

Time for a London tea! The Tea Palace shop in Covent Garden offered a bunch of tasting samples, and this was one of them! I thought the sample was absolutely delicious, so I decided to bring some home. This is one of the only tea shops I went to that actually offered sample sizes of their teas; they had cute small tins that held about 30g of tea. They also were having a promotion in honor of their anniversary that if you spent £20, you would get a free sample tin. Which obviously meant that the number of samples I meant to get increased until I hit £20 to get a free one (since I was pretty close already).

The dry leaf on this one is full of yellow marigold petals, and big chunks of whole vanilla beans chopped into the mixture. It smells like vanilla, yes, but there’s also a deeper, caramelly-toffee aroma. Brewed the black tea aroma comes to the forefront, and the vanilla drops to the back a bit.

The taste initially is of a black tea with some vanilla on the side, and I was a bit disappointed thinking I’d need to tweak my steeping parameters because I remembered it being more flavored. But as it cools the vanilla really comes out; this is the tea I remember! It’s very vanilla-y, with a bit of creaminess but not a lot, and that caramelized note is also present in the taste. The vanilla seems thick and rich without being cloying, and the tea has a wonderfully smooth mouthfeel. The black tea is present but playing a supporting role; it has a twinge of bitterness, so I might drop the steeping temp on this one next time. Definitely a fantastic version of a vanilla black tea!

I’ve got a bit of this tea thanks to threewhales! Thanks! It is a really nice vanilla black with just the right amount of heft. Yum! This one is really good.